If you get deep enough into it, the path of least resistance slowly becomes using Emacs for everything. Macros at the keyboard level still have their uses, for all the things Emacs can't do. As emacs becomes more popular, expect that list to get smaller.
Of course, if you're not a coder, emacs will never replace your Excel / Photoshop / AutoCAD etc. custom macros.
Don't know about least resistance. I found that trying to replace emacs' utterly unergonomic bindings and other insane defaults without conflicting with all the plugins you kinda need to work around its dated built-in features is an uphill swim.
Looks like a clusterfuck composed for you by other people is still a clusterfuck.
I gave it a couple hours and ran into a bunch of issues just by using spacemacs master and enabling a few layers.
For example, semantic seems to be pretty broken and unmaintained, and only googling around is how you find out. Yet other layers' documentation kinda (not so) subtly nudge you towards installing broken crap like this, without telling you that it's broken. https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/5yxxrl/what_is_that_...
Enabling version-control layer breaks a bunch of magit functionality, including basics such as commit. Don't enable that broken layer, I guess? Funny, apparently fixed in develop and still broken in master 9 months later.. https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/12056
And I still haven't found a way out of silly autoindentation so I'm forced to waste time trying to configure features that I did not want in the first place :(
Stuff like ^N and ^P aren't quite working like in vim either..
This kind of stuff is pretty much exactly what pushed me away from emacs the second time I tried to use it for real. A tangled mess of a bazillion packages that interfere with each other and come in various degrees of unmaintained, broken, or obviously broken is not a good foundation for building good software.
Did you try master-branch? For whatever reason development-culture at spacemacs is very broken and most work happens in develop-branch which rarely is merged into master. I think at the moment they are around 1-2 years behind on master and only add critical patches AFAIK. For this reason most people use develop-branch and avoid master-branch.
I think the bigger problem with spacemacs is that they have a vision too big, and emacs just does not offer tools and culture to support it. So they are constantly working against the hill.
I switched recently from Vim to Evil after more than two decades, mainly because I prefer proportional fonts these days, and also because of Magit (I’m really annoyed by “free” Git GUIs going the subscription route after building up a big enough user base).
The road has been bumpy so far, but I’m slowly getting used to Emacs’ idiosyncrasies. The journey has been worth it.
Of course, if you're not a coder, emacs will never replace your Excel / Photoshop / AutoCAD etc. custom macros.